C

Unit 25- C

I’m very lucky really because, although I only have one brother, I have a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles. My mother is the eldest of ten children, so it’s a very big family on her side.

I won’t even begin to explain who they all are, but I’ll tell you about my father’s side of the family.

My father, Joseph Brown, was one of four brothers. The eldest was Keith, my Uncle Keith, and he married Elsie down in London, and they had two daughters, Ruth and Helen, so those are two of my cousins.

My father was next, and then younger than him was my Uncle Arthur. Now, when Arthur was young he joined the Army and went off to India, where he married Kay, an Indian lady, and they had two sons, Jeff and Alan. Unfortunately, they got divorced - Arthur and Kay got divorced - and Arthur came back to England alone.

So I have two cousins - two half-Indian cousins, in fact - that I’ve never met. All I know about them is that one of them - Jeff, I think - was a footballer at one time. So perhaps one day we’ll actually meet up with each other. Anyway, when Arthur came back to England he settled in Blackpool and married Dorothy, but they didn’t have any children.

And then the youngest of my father’s brothers is my Uncle John, who lives here in Leyland, and he’s the only one that’s still alive. His wife was Kathleen, and they had two children as well, a son and a daughter, Stuart and Tina, so those are my other two cousins.

So altogether, from my English side of the family, I’ve got six cousins: Stuart and Tina, Ruth and Helen, and Jeff and Alan.

Now my father himself married my mother Susan, who came to England from Ireland when she was seventeen to train as a nurse. They had two children, my brother Joseph and myself, Maria.

There seems to be a family tradition of calling one of the sons Joseph, because my father’s father was also Joseph.

Anyway, my brother Joseph went to study in the USA and he finally got married there. His wife is called Diana, and they have two daughters, my nieces Sarah and Alison, who are teenagers, and they all live in Seattle.